Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It’s that time of year where every week seems to bring a film with Oscar buzz all over it. After seeing Three Billboards I’d be very interested to see a better performance than Frances McDormand as the desperate mother of a murdered daughter.

The trailer suggests this will be a knockabout black comedy battle of wills between McDormand and Woody Harrison’s Sherrie defamed by the titular advertising hoardings. Which kind of sells the film short which is not to say it isn’t blackly comic, that McDormand curses up a storm and has all the best putdowns.
It’s just that it a far more violent, nuanced and thoughtful film than that.

It’s a film where motivation is key and the lines between good and bad are blurred and moveable. No one has the purest of intentions and there is redemption and change but it has a twisted take on morality that some may find troubling.

Sam Rockwell’s Dixon is at first glance a typical buttheaded small town bigoted coward who somehow made it through police academy. We learn perhaps why he is this way but the film doesn’t offer that as an excuse or reason to sympathise or forgive. He’s an overgrown man child with a juvenile temper to match.

Don’t want to reveal too much about the twists and turns the film takes but his isn’t the film you may think it is from the publicity, it may not give you what you want but give you a lot to think about.
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Comments

Obviously, it’s all opinions, but I really disliked this movie. From where I was sat it was excessively nihilistic, utterly lacking in nuance and overly pleased with itself for what is basically a Cohen brothers rip off that misses the point badly.

The film’s central message is that pain makes you righteous, and that you should therefore feel free to go out into the world and spread it around a bit. I can see why it’s caught the public imagination, because it’s a perfect reflection of our current bullshit sensibility – burn shit down from a lofty vantage point of moral superiority. Crucify the motherfuckers. Particularly easy to do in a universe where there are essentially no consequences for your actions, unless of course you’re one of the motherfuckers.

The movie’s sole reference to any sort of moral framework is handed to the village idiot, who gets “anger begets anger” off a bookmark. That moron.

The characters are largely stock and one note (maybe two note, tops). McDormand is the hero, striding around delivering crowd pleasing Bon mots to priests and coppers (those fucks), and occasionally stopping to cry over the odd deer, just in case we’re in any doubt whose side we’re on.

McDormand and Rockwell are both great, but then they always are, and it’s only their performances which stop the entire thing from toppling over.

Perhaps the movie’s intent was to satirise the destructive forces alive in our culture, but I didn’t get that impression. I kept waiting for the movie to open up and give us some nuance, to explore the complexity of some of the characters, but it never really did.

And here’s one: I liked it. I don’t seek a profound message in slice-of-life films like this. I don’t read much into most films. I just see them as stories. The more interesting the characters and original the story, the more likely I am to like it. That’s exactly the reason why I hate the goodie vs baddie formula blockbusters that you seem to favour but like films like this.

Also, for all that clever clever schtick Chaw seems to have missed something fairly fundamental about one of the characters. I might be wrong, and might just be inferring too much, but SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Dixon’s gay, isn’t he?

I agree with you @Gary. This was an excellent film and ,to be completely over the top perhaps ,I would be surprised if I see a better film this year. If McDormand doesn’t win an Oscar for this then a major travesty will have been performed.
I agree with the comments that it is similar to the Coen Brothers but not a rip off. My favourite film of all time perhaps is Fargo. My wife doesn’t like that film at all. Before we saw it a friend had told us ‘if you loved Fargo you will love this’. This comment gave my wife reservations however she loved it. I can see Coen Brothers similarities in script and the use of McDormand but thats about it. Reading Kid Dynamites comment about ‘unfinished’ I can kind of agree with that but my take on it was the viewer was left to put their own conclusion to how the story ended based on their own morality.

Being a bit harsh there, Bingo, although I don’t think it’s an entirely satisfactory film by any means. It starts really strongly, but after about forty minutes it peters out. There’s a load of good scenes, and some great dialogue, but none of it hangs together very well, and to no great purpose that I can see. When it’s good, it’s great, but there’s just something kind of unfinished about it.

7Isn’t it purposely meant to feel ‘unfinished’? The whole point is that the answer may just pop up one day in a bar, a prison cell or a drunken boast. That life goes on until it gives up the things you want – I would have been disappointed if everything had been wrapped up in a nice neat pat conclusion

‘Let’s decide on the way there’ could be a strapline because people appear to take different things from it according to their own moral compass.

When I said “unfinished” I wasn’t referring directly to the faint ambiguity of the closing scene. It was more to do with the general lack of cohesiveness across the whole film, something that might have been addressed with more time spent on the script or the edit.

I LIKED the fact that it felt unfinished, and that it veered from psycho thriller to black humour to whatever else every five minutes. But basically, Frances McDormand is just the best actress ever, I always like her (anyone seen Olive Kitteridge? You should) and she should win the Oscar but I bet it goes to Aunty Meryl

McDormand is the hero? In what way is she heroic?
No, her character Mildred is clearly the main protagonist. There is nothing particularly heroic about her at all. She is driven and determined and deeply flawed, but in no way a heroic character.

If anybody’s heroic it’s Dixon, surely? He falls as far as it’s possible to fall (from a low starting point, admittedly) and then through a combination of stubbornness and good luck drags himself back up again to a point where he can look himself in the mirror again – and to the point where an amused FMcD is prepared to share a car with him on their undefined mission.

As mentioned on here a few weeks back this is the best film I have seen in a long, long time – simply magnificent. Both tragic and funny, often at the same time. Ensemble playing of the highest order, every character is good and bad and everything in between ie like, you know, real life. How you can read any of this wonderful movie as “simplistic and patronising” is either perverse or, more likely, as Wrong as Wrong can get.
And the end is perfect, just perfect.

I agree with Kid Dynamite, and for me that unfinished feeling was most evident in the ending, which I thought was a bit untidy.

*SPOILERS*

I’m not bothered that it copped out on telling us how they dealt with the guy from Idaho; that’s a loose end I could deal with. What I didn’t like was not knowing to what extent the guy *was* involved. The DNA didn’t match and he was away on military service, ergo not the killer. So what was he doing trying to intimidate Mildred earlier in the film? That shoe needed to drop, because one loose end? Fine. Two? Yeck.

SPOILER
But surely the ending mirrored the uncertainty of the film, the uncertainty of life? It was pretty obvious, at least to me, that the pair set off as vigilantes going to kill a scumbag they were certain had committed a crime if not the crime on The Billboards then decided to stop and have a cup of coffee and think about what the hell they were actually doing taking the law into their own hands….
Perfect and not a loose end in sight.

Hey Lodey, you’re a loadstone of wrongness: where’d ya get the idea that he thought she’d heard his confession from? You dreamt that bit, that’s where. Their first encounter is in the shop. Leicester is right, there’s no explanation at all as to why he threatened her, other than his claim of being friends with the sheriff, which seems unlikely.

‘She’ should have been ‘he’ (obviously). The bad guy put two and two together and made forty-three (obviously). He’d seen all them billboards and thought “Oh fuck, she’ll hear I confessed to a rape but it’s the wrong rape but I had better sort her out like pronto or else that sheriff will be on my trail and I got a girl in Reno” (obviously).

Yeah, I don’t know what purpose that earlier scene serves. Feels like an escapee from a previous draft of the script. Or maybe a late addition to mitigate the potential miscarriage of justice set up by the very end. Certainly I’d like the ending better without it.

Saw it yesterday.
Excellent film, probably McDonagh’s best so far.
The Coen Bros notion is a red herring, & only flies momentarily because of FM’s taking the lead in it & in Fargo. The two characters she plays are fundamentally different, with different motivations & MOs. The other fundamental difference between McDonagh & the Coens is, in my view, that unlike the Coens, McDonagh isn’t playing & what he puts on screen he stands by.
I’ve loved Joel & Ethan since Blood Simple, but even Coen fanboys/girls cop to the fact that sometimes they just enjoy using their considerable talents to ‘have a go at a genre’. It often works – True Grit, Miller’s Crossing as examples, & other times it bombs badly, such as with The Hudsucker Proxy. What I never really get the feeling with them is that they really ‘mean it’, but such is their craft, it usually doesn’t matter. I will be astounded if they ever undertake a project a la Spielberg that is purely driven by passion for the story needing to be told, rather than as a vehicle to showcase their skills & give us all plenty of laughs (usually).
In contrast, McDonagh’s take is in my view far more heartfelt. He really does believe that much of life is fucking bleak & everybody has huge flaws, even when they’re striving to be upright – but that even if the grimmest situations there is a wealth of laughter.
He desribes his cinematic tastes as mid way between Preston Sturgess & Sam Peckinpah. One a deeply cynical but comedic individual & the other as nihilistic as you’ll find this side
of Cormac McCarthy. Knowing this makes his movies make awhole lot of sense.
Nobody in 3 Billboards is a hero, & nobody gets redemption. The ‘good’ characters are capable of evil & the bad characters ( with the exception of the unknown murderer ) are capable of empathy & attempting to do good even when they are fully aware that they have done appalling things.
This strikes me as far more like the way life actually is & the people actually are than 99% of film fare.
The majority of the criticisms/ complaints about the film seem to stem from the fact Rockwell’s character is not given a comeuppance & the accusation that McDonagh’ s film doesn’t focus on the wrongs done to African Americans by a significant character. Essentially that he didn’t make the film they wanted to see rather than the one he wanted.
That can be applied to any film film ever made.
I will re watch this film & I expect it to grow on me even more.